A. J. Jacobs’ first bestseller was on his reading through the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Now he’s come up with an equally fascinating and humorous account of his Year of Living Biblically (Simon and Schuster). Christianity Today’s Books & Culture review sums: “At its heart, this is a book about all the various ways religious people pick and choose, the most famous being many Christians’ fixation on the six biblical statements about homosexual relations in comparison to what Jacobs claims are seven thousand – seven thousand! – biblical comments on how to treat the poor.”
Jacobs visited the weekly Bible study of Evangelicals Concerned in New York and recalls his experience. He captures the study’s essence: “The ninety-minute session glides by without a single mention of homosexuality. If an evangelist from Thomas Road Baptist Church [which he’d also visited] happened to drop in, he might not even notice anything different.”
Kirk Talley is inducted into the Christian Music Hall of Fame’s very first class of honorees. Between his two connECtion concerts this summer, Talley was in Texas to be honored along with Andrae Crouch, Bill and Gloria Gaither, Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, Clara Ward, James Cleveland, Mahalia Jackson, Ira D. Sankey, Homer Rodeheaver, Ethel Waters and George Beverly Shea. During the event, he sang “Serenaded by Angels”, the most popular of all the songs he’s written.
2008 Gordon College graduate Diana McLean was the youngest keynoter ever to address a connECtion of Evangelicals Concerned. She spoke this summer at EC’s 60th connECtion. McLean told of how, as a junior – and straight – she was disgusted to hear of a Gordon graduate’s (and preacher’s) joking about his cruelty to a gay student. She then decided to try to collect the stories of gay and lesbian students at Gordon. With support from a chaplain and student affairs staff, McLean and two of her fellow students were able to compile 12 testimonies and the college facilitated their publication and distribution as a booklet, If I Told You, throughout the Gordon campus family. She reports that students were deeply moved by what they read and she’s unaware of any negative reaction. The students’ stories can be downloaded at www.ifitoldyou.org.
Azariah Southworth, popular young host of Christian television’s The Remix, has come out as gay. In the 30-minute show, seen in more than 128 million homes, Southworth focused on cooking, shopping and talking with young Christian music artists.
On his blog on April 17, “My Coming Out – Day 1”, he explained that he’s gone through “years of seeking deliverance through counseling and prayer” and he concludes “this is who I am”. In an interview a few days later, he reports: “I’ve received literally hundreds of emails from everyone around the world and they’re all encouraging. I can count on one hand how many were negative. The amazing amount of support and encouragement has astounded me.” Asked if the support comes from fans of the show, Southworth says: “No, I haven’t heard from anyone that has said they had watched the show and are supportive. [In] my professional life, I have not heard from anyone.”
Americans’ support for the legalization of same-sex marriage has dropped from 46% to 40% in the past year. This is a finding of the 2008 Gallup Values and Belief Survey. Concurrently, and for the first time, a Field Poll finds that 51% of Californians support same-sex marriage.
In May, the Republican-dominated California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. The majority drew on a ruling that overturned a state ban on interracial marriage 60 years ago. A dissenting justice said her sympathies were with the plaintiffs challenging the bans on same-sex marriage but “we should allow the significant achievements embodied in the domestic partnership statutes to continue to take root. If there is to be a new understanding of the meaning of marriage in California, it should develop among the people of our state and find its expression at the ballot box.”
Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzennegger said he accepts the court’s decision and would not support a constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage.
Writing in World, the Religious Right newsmagazine he founded, Joel Belz weighs in on the court’s ruling by lamenting that “very often these days”, he hears from “many of my evangelical friends” that they’re tired of being identified as antigay. He fears that a majority of Californians may support same-sex marriage and, if so, “we Christians will need some radical readjustments to living as a shrinking minority in so secular a society. In fact, even if we aren’t there quite yet, it’s where we’re likely to be a generation from now.”
Mildred Loving has died. In 1958 she and Richard Loving wanted to marry. But she was black and he was white, so their marriage was a violation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. Late one night, they were arrested in their home and sentenced to a year in prison unless they would leave the state and stay away for 25 years. Judge Leon M. Bazile declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” In 1967, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws and the couple returned to Virginia.
Last year, on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling, she issued a statement supporting same-sex marriage.
“Marriage is all through the Bible, and it’s not gender-neutral”. Liberal political activist Jim Wallis recently made this point in an interview with Christianity Today. He says: “I have never done a blessing for a same-sex couple. I’ve never been asked to do one. I’m not sure that I would.” But, he adds: “I don’t have all the answers on homosexuality. Fifty years from now, when we understand more what’s going on, we’ll look back and we’ll ask: How did we treat gay and lesbian people? Did they feel like we treated them the way Jesus might have? And how do we treat each other in this conversation? When this becomes the defining issue of our time, I get nervous.”
Theologian J. I. Packer, 81, has quit the Anglican Church of Canada. Citing “poisonous liberalism” in the church, Packer claims Vancouver’s bishop, Michael Ingham, “appears heretical” for having sanctioned same-sex blessings in the British Columbia. In 2005, Time magazine listed Packer as one of the world’s 25 most influential evangelicals.
Homosexuality “could evolve into a spiritual Katrina in the black church”. This is the warning of a black “ex-gay” activist in Atlanta. In a cover story, “The Black Church and the 21st Century”, in the Pentecostal magazine, Charisma, he claims “homosexuality has become more rampant among churchgoers. What’s more, it is better organized.”
In this same cover story, Boston’s Azusa Christian Community pastor Eugene F. Rivers III writes alarmingly of the fact that “single parents head 62 percent of African-American households, and 68 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock. That percentage is more than double that of white single-parent households (27 percent) and nearly twice as high as that of Hispanic single-parent families (35 percent).” So Rivers then goes on to urge black church leaders to get involved “in public policy debates that support the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.”
Gay youth expect to have long-term, committed same-sex relationships. This is a finding of a study of gay youths in New York City. Researchers found that “more than 90% of females and more than 80% of males expect to be partnered in a monogamous relationship after age 30”. Most also want to rear children. Penn State and New York University social scientists recently published these findings in the Journal of LGBT Issues in Counseling.
After speaking out for her gay son and voting for marriage rights for all, New York Assembly member, Teresa R. Sayward, says she’s gotten “an excellent reception” from her upstate district. The Republican lawmaker adds that, of course, we did get “some heated phone calls”, too.
“People like us are going to go to hell, according to Christians.” This is what self-identified “bisexual”, Matthew J. Murray, 24, wrote in a blog before killing two people at a Youth With A Mission center and another two at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Shot and wounded by a church security guard, he killed himself. In one posting, Murray wrote: “Using drugs, alcohol and having gay sex, I’m just trying to do what any Christian pastor would do. At least I’m not doing meth like Ted Haggard.” He noted that the church had forgiven Haggard, its founder, but added: “I want to know where was all the love, mercy and compassion for my supposed imperfections?”
“What To Do When Your Child is Gay” is a Charisma (June) article by Mike Ensley of the Exodus “ex-gay” network. He asserts: “Your son no more chose to experience same-sex attractions (SSA) than another boy chose to feel that rush of adrenaline the first time a friend showed him a Playboy magazine.” Ensley notes that, though parents’ “primary focus is to ‘fix’ their kid”, they should “set attainable goals”. He warns: “you’ll never have peace aiming for goals you can’t achieve and controlling your kid’s thoughts and choices is one of those.” Ensley advises against becoming “simply a person who is trying to make him straight – something he has probably tried on his own to be, only to conclude it’s impossible.” Instead, he urges: “Be open to the fact that this is a journey, one on which not all paths are bright and clear. … The resolution is not going to be as simple as addressing your son’s or daughter’s sexual identity issues (as complex as that is) … There’s no technique that provides an easy escape. … [It’s an] ongoing struggle [and] suffering.” He concludes: “There is a long road ahead, but God will never leave you alone.”
Metanoia, an “ex-gay” effort founded by Doug Houck, boasts that the program’s “success rate” is “85% – 90%”. The site says these figures refer to “those who have left homosexuality to pursue sexual wholeness.” But according to Houck, this does not mean “a complete elimination of homosexual behavior: homosexual contact, [homosexual] masturbation, buying/reading [homosexual] pornography, etc.”
Where are all the “ex-gays”? When sympathetic researchers ask “ex-gay” groups to refer “successes” for questioning, they’ve been sent only a few individuals who even claim to have changed even somewhat. Now PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays) says the reason so few are available for questioning is this: “Many ex-gays are afraid to come out of the closet because of the harassment they will receive – their names, phone numbers and personal information posted on gay websites, attacked at ex-gay exhibit booths, press releases issued against them, etc.”
A Canadian “reparative” therapist and Bible college teacher has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a 20-year-old client who’d sought his help to become “ex-gay”. The therapist had explained that their masturbatory sessions, called “touch therapy”, would prepare the young man for sex with a wife some day.
Noisy lesbian activists, banging on pots and pans, closed down a lecture at Smith College in April. Rather than offering an easily reasonable rebuttal to Ryan Sorba’s antigay talk on what he calls “The Born Gay Hoax”, they resorted to “recreational vitriol” – as linguist John McWhorter insightfully terms such agitprop. Now, Sorba’s supporters on the Religious Right are showing video of this mayhem as evidence of the intolerance of what they call “the gay rights lobby”.
Right-wing African-American preacher, Harry R. Jackson, Jr., reacts to a Soulforce Equality Riders and National Black Justice Coalition encounter at his church. Though he says the visitors acted “respectfully this time,” he warns that there is a “tone of intimidation [in] the radical gay rights [movement’s] revving up its engines for an all out push to ‘mainstream’ gays”. He rejects analogies to the racial civil rights movement and says the goal of gay rights activists is “to force us to accept their lifestyle by slowly desensitizing us to their aberrant theology and practices.” He predicts that, in the next decade, “gays will attempt to invade the conventional Bible believing church” and adds, “be prepared for things to get rough.” Jackson made these remarks in his CR Daily commentary, “Foreplay or Rough Sex with Evangelicals”, in June.
“I am genetically and biologically a black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended.” Crystal Dixon, Associate Vice President of Human Resources at the University of Toledo, opined in the Toledo Free Press. Making a distinction between race and sexual orientation, she argued that while she has no choice in being black, people do choose to be gay. She claimed: “Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle”. The school’s president said Dixon’s views “do not accord with the values of the University of Toledo”. She was fired and is suing the school for violating her free speech rights.
The late Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore, Jr., lived a secret gay life, according to his daughter, poet Honor Moore. In her memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter (W. W. Norton), excerpted in The New Yorker, Moore says her father – twice married and father of nine children – struggled with homosexuality all his life. One of his same-sex relationships lasted for nearly 30 years. Said a longtime friend: “It was the times he lived in. That’s the sad fact. People who say they didn’t know? Well, you know, people see what they want to see.” On The New Yorker website, she says her father’s “life of divided desire could not help but inform his compassionate attitude toward other people”. Some, like Os Guinness, have been harshly critical of the book (as Guinness was of Francis Schaeffer’s son’s candid account of his father), but in her New York Times review, Kathryn Harrison writes: “In revealing Paul Moore as he could never disclose himself, in showing him humbled and suffering, Honor Moore does not diminish but enlarges him.”
There are “no triable issues” in a lawsuit that parents of two Lutheran high school students, accused of a lesbian relationship, brought against the California Lutheran High School. A Riverside County judge ruled that religious schools are not held to the state’s sexual orientation antidiscrimination requirements. The attorney for the girls and their parents said he’d appeal the ruling, arguing that the high school is not a religious institution.
The case stemmed from the school’s principal’s interrogating the girls in 2005 and then expelling them and telling their parents that the two could not remain in school “with those feelings”.
The Yeshiva of Flatbush, Brooklyn, barred an alumnus from bringing his same-sex partner to a tenth-year reunion. The reason for the school’s decision was Jewish law or halacha. Close to 300 alumni – gay and non-gay – urged the school to change the policy and introduce “Open Reunions”. In 2005, this Orthodox school’s principal resigned and left the rabbinate and Orthodoxy, saying he was under pressure because of his homosexuality.
Israel’s Attorney General rules that same-sex couples may adopt children. The Israeli Justice Ministry said: “It was decided there is no legal hindrance from approving same-sex couples, or one of the partners, to adopt an unrelated child who is not the child of either partner.” The decision has infuriated Israel’s antigay lobbies.
Tel Aviv’s first gay and lesbian community center is now open. The city hall’s advisor for GLBT affairs said the center will be a haven for the elderly who “spent years underground, at a time when they were under risk of serious personal harm if they were to be exposed.” Tel Aviv’s mayor spoke at the dedication ceremony.
New York Gov. David Paterson’s chief of staff believes the Roman Catholic priesthood is full of homosexuals. Charles O’Byrne, a former Jesuit priest and a Columbia Law School graduate, who is now Patterson’s major aide, once worked on a book on his observations about sex among gay priests. His recollections were published in Playboy. O’Byrne, a close friend of the Kennedy family, officiated at the wedding of John F. Kennedy, Jr. in 1996.
Soon after assuming office at Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s resignation, Paterson pledged: “We will push on until we bring full marriage equality to New York state.” Early this summer, Paterson instructed all state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages performed in jurisdictions where they are legal.
Roman Catholic bishops covered up priests’ sex abuse of teenage boys for fear of blackmail over their own homosexuality. This is the contention of Catholic World Report’s veteran editor Philip F. Lawler in his new book, The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture (Encounter). Citing a number of instances, Lawler argues that “the blackmail hypothesis provides a logical explanation for behavior that is otherwise inexplicable: the bishops’ willingness to risk the welfare of the faithful … in order to protect abusive priests.” As Lawler sees it, “The first aspect of the scandal, the sexual abuse of children, has been acknowledged and addressed. The second aspect, the rampant homosexuality among Catholic priests, has been acknowledged but not addressed, and later even denied. … [This] third aspect of the scandal has never even been acknowledged by American church leaders [and] is today the most serious of all.
A Roman Catholic school run by the Holy Cross Fathers is giving official approval to the campus group, Gay Straight Partnership. This University of Portland club aims at being “welcoming to all students” and providing a forum for better understanding between gay and straight students. Antigay agencies are lobbying against the group.
The United Methodists have voted to retain the denomination’s policy that homosexual acts are “incompatible with Christian teaching”. A 517 to 416 vote of delegates in quadrennial convention in May rejected a call to “refrain from judgment regarding homosexual persons and practices as the Spirit leads us to new insight.”
Fort Worth’s Broadway Baptist Church will picture its gay couples in the church’s 125th anniversary photo directory. The photo controversy prompted a vote to oust the pastor, Brett Younger. But the congregation voted 499 to 237 to retain him. This historic downtown church is one of the more moderate congregations in the Southern Baptist Convention. After the vote, a leader of the antigay faction warned: “300 members have or want to leave”.
James Dobson, 71, says he’s worried about a failure of future leadership against “the gay agenda”. Speaking to 1,400 attendees at the National Religious Broadcasters meeting in March, he noted that the deaths of Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy and the ageing of Pat Robertson and others, weakens the forces against homosexuality. Aware that younger evangelicals are not all that interested in opposing gays and lesbians, though they’re still prolife and interested in other issues of social justice and the environment, Dobson asked: “Who in the next generation will be willing to take the heat” in the fight against homosexuality?
David P. Gushee says: “I think that the Religious Right as it has existed for the last 30- years has definitely reached its peak and is declining. I think if you understand the Religious Left as the old mainline then it is definitely in trouble.” Gushee, an evangelical Christian ethicist at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, made these observations in a Reuters interview in April. He notes: “John McCain ends up as the winner [of the Republican nomination] despite bitter opposition from some of the most visible Religious Right leaders like James Dobson. And one reason he did emerge as the winner is because his stance is more evangelical center.” Gushee’s latest book is The Future of Faith in American Politics (Baylor University Press).
AND FINALLY:
In multimillion-dollar church property lawsuits, Paul’s horror over Christians hauling other Christians into secular courts is being ignored. Paul’s question to Corinthian Christians: “Why not rather be wronged?!”
But an amicus brief was filed by 16 Christian denominations to support the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia’s efforts to overturn a Reconstruction-era law allowing seceding congregations to keep their property. Among the friends-of-the-court are the United Methodists, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Church of the Brethren, Evangelical Lutherans, Seventh-day Adventists and the Worldwide Church of God.
Meanwhile, two ambiguous words taken from the biblical chapter against such lawsuits (I Cor 6) are used these days to condemn homosexuals to hell.